Paizo Licenses Pathfinder MMO Rights to Goblinworks !

Paizo has licensed the rights to create a Pathfinder based MMORPG to a new developer company, Goblinworks. Pathfinder Online will be a hybrid sandbox/theme park-style MMO, where the player’s actions could shape the world to the fullest.

Yesterday Paizo Publishing LLC.announced, that they licensed the MMORPG electronic gaming rights for their very successful Pathfinder Roleplaying Game intellectual property to Goblinworks, a new development company formed solely to create the new Pathfinder MMORPG, called Pathfinder Online.

Pathfinder Online is planned to be a sandbox type MMORPG, where players could move around and form the world with their actions. The players will be heroes in Pathfinder’s unique fantasy world, filed with sword and sorcery adventures in kingdoms inhabited and controlled by thousands of players. That’s right, players could create and improve settlements, which could be even mayor power centers if managed properly.

The characters could explore, develop, adventure and dominate the domains in the River Kingdoms by playing one of the classes available in Pathfinder RPG. They could be anything : a fighter, a wizard, a rogue, or anything else available. It’s also mentioned, that they could go beyond the standard options to create even more types of player characters.

The economy in Pathfinder Online will be player-driven robust trading-system, as players could create and sell not only items and consumables, but fortifications and complete settlements. Players could even form complete kingdoms to rule the land, as described on the opening page at Goblinworks website.

“Character-controlled settlements can grow into full-fledged kingdoms that compete for resources as they seek to become the dominant force in the land, raising vast armies to hold their territory against the depredations of monstrous creatures, NPC factions, and other player characters.”

I’m extremely interested how could they execute this part of the Pathfinder Online project, to make it logical, usable, and not broken. We will see.

As you may imagine, in this robust game player socialization will range from adventuring parties consisting several players to complete nations formed by thousands. The wilderness around expanding settlements will develop to be more complex with random encounters, scripted adventures and random resources appearing.

Of course, the world of Pathfinder Online will be filled with non-player kingdoms, monsters, and different places to explore. They plan to create a solid core first for the release, and expand upon it later.

I think overall Pathfinder Online seems to be a very promising and unique MMORPG project, and I hope we wil get regular updates about the development. While it’s only in the beggining of the design process, I guess we will get some preview about what is planned for the game at least at PaizoCon next year.

The idea of a dynamic MMO has been done before, Shadowbane, a game which was plaqued by technical issues when it was released. Those technical issues created a loss of interest in the game and a loss of playerbase. My hope is that the company puts due diligence to the creation of the game. In other words, don’t release the game until it’s ready to be released.